Hey Sandra,
Thanks for initiating this! I help maintain this guide for RHEL
and have sadly been too busy lately to get very involved on the
Fedora side of things. :(
I've been also looking at whether this book has the right user in
mind for RHEL, and I think currently it's aimed at too many types
of users -- I agree, the novice/GUI focus sounds best. I think
some of this guide gets pretty technical and detailed in parts,
and is probably not needed for a novice user.
I've actually added a quick start chapter to the end of the guide
[1] for RHEL7, so if you want to use any of it (the content is
under the http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ license),
go for it. (Or if you have any feedback on that chapter as a
novice, feel free to share).
Also, let me know if you need any help with the project -- I
really appreciate you taking it on, and I'm happy to contribute in
little bits if I can!
Cheers,
Dayle
[1]
https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/7/html/Virtualization_Getting_Started_Guide/chap-Virtualization_Getting_Started-Quickstart.html
On 03/17/2015 11:03 AM, Glen Rundblom wrote:
I agree with the plan, and I am happy that Sandra proposed this
direction. I have been thinking of how to word my Boxes guide: is
this a how-to manual, or just just technical instructions. For me:
I learn more from how-to manuals and branch into technical details
as I need them. Also, working with the Novice in mind makes me
think of the "what if the person does not see..." or "what if they
encounter that" and try to solve issues they may encounter as they
try to do the task, but may not have the ability to troubleshoot
an issue that just happened during the process.
Also, writing for Novices/How-to is more forgiving of first and
second person voicing, which I have a tendency to do.
So I have been working with the mindset of a how-to manual for
someone beginning with the application, because I am learning the
application, publican, docbook, git, mailing lists, and Linux all
together!)
I have this conception that the more friendly and built for
novices something is, the more solid and polished it seems. I am
more then willing to put more time and work to make to do that.
So, thank you Sandra!
-Glen
On 03/16/2015 05:51 PM, Pete Travis
wrote:
On 03/16/2015 02:28 PM, Sandra
McCann wrote:
Hi
folks -
We’ve
been batting around ideas for the virtualization
guides for a bit now in irc, but I’d like to get
some more feedback on the approach we can take.
Seems
there are two personas involved. Using our draft
personas
we have :
-
Technical
Tony - experienced IT person virtualizing on
servers etc, knows his stuff and is spinning up
VMs like they’re candy.
-
Novice
Ned (or Novice Nancy in my case :-) - Fairly new
to virtualization, and looking to spin up a VM
or two for her own work.
Given
these two personas, I’d like to suggest that the
Virtualization Getting Started guide be targeted to
Novice Nancy. To do this we would:
-
Add
an installing virtualization tools chapter -
simple effort to install the virtualization
group package and bring up virt-manager.
(smccann)
-
Add an ‘Creating
Guests with Virt-Manager chapter - copying
from here. (smccann)
-
Adding
a ‘Creating Guests with Boxes chapter
(grundblom)
-
Make
minor edits as needed to remove Fedora 19
references and any references (if present) to a
larger set of virtualization guides that may not
be available as F21 guides yet.
I
also had one question -
Anyway,
I’d like to get the getting started done and
committed before considering the Admin and Deploy
guide (because..ahem.. I AM Novice Nancy here and it
will take longer for me to parse that guide).
Thoughts?
Sandra
This seems like a solid plan to me. There's a lot of content in
the guide now that's reads strictly as a launch point for the
larger guides, so something more like purging paragraphs might
be more appropriate than simply removing references. You have a
good idea of where you want to go with it; I only make that
point to ensure you don't feel obligated to keep the existing
content and write around it.
The hardware list is accurate, but not complete. You might want
to focus on a few specific pieces of hardware instead of listing
and explaining all possible options though, ie:
This is how you add a network device. This virtio option
might need these extra drivers on a windows guest.
This is how you add a virtual block device. This virtio
option might need these extra drivers on a windows guest. (
depending on how deep you want to go, you could cover switching
out a windows installation iso for the virtio driver iso so it
can see virtio storage, then switching back. There's a definite
performance improvement in virtio over SATA emulation, but the
setup is going to add a page or two to your instructions)
This is how you provide an ISO to the guest.
This is how you share part of the host filesystem with a
linux guest
These are all spice related devices. If you choose spice (
the default ) you get them automatically, here is what they do.
Things like memory, CPU, input devices are set up automatically,
or during initial creation. IMO my the time you have documented
the device types that might need some explanation, the user is
familiar with the device management screen and knows where to
go, they don't need much or any explanation.
Your plan seems GUI focused; I like that. It makes for a much
easier read for new users when it doesn't look like you need to
learn a bunch of scary programming to make it work :) We can
put cli stuff somewhere else.
--
-- Pete Travis
- Fedora Docs Project Leadt
- 'randomuser' on freenode
- immanetize@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
--
Dayle Parker
Senior Technical Writer
Red Hat Asia Pacific - Brisbane, Australia
dayleparker@xxxxxxxxxx
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